Of course display advertising doesn’t work!

The consistently excellent Gavin Heaton tweeted a link today to an article in DigiDay where the interviewee, a senior media buying CEO finally comes clean in admitting that actually, people don’t really click on display advertising online.

In recent months, I’ve commented grumpily on the increasing trend for media buying agencies to quote a 3% response to an ad campaign as a “good thing”. Rather than of course admitting that 97% of the audience walked briskly in the opposite direction. A smart judge in the industry reminded me of the importance of attribution from online advertising and it’s a fair point that just seeing an ad may make you curious and go Googling for it later. But “may” might be the operative word.

Some of my best friends are media buyers and I come here not to bury but to praise them. It’s actually not their fault that display advertising doesn’t really work so well online. The causes are way beyond their control.

Years ago, I cut my teeth in media working on advertising sales at a local newspaper. I think our office, pictured, was similar to most media companies.

The odd typewriter for creating invoices, but otherwise a telephone and maybe an ashtray on each desk and a mountain of paper, mainly piles of newspapers and magazines to dissect looking for leads.

Advertising in newspapers and magazines in the 1980’s was hot stuff. If you wanted to find a job in Media, you bought the Guardian every Monday, in the vain hope that some glamorous London TV station was looking for graduates with a Comms degree and no experience. Buying a home meant first buying the local paper and scanning through the ads. Same if you wanted to buy a car or sell your old one.

In magazines, all of the research showed that people saw advertising as editorial. Readers of Max Power, still not old enough to drive, devoured mail order adverts for mag wheels and boomboxes. Readers of Today’s Golfer pored over advertisements for new golf gear and the only place to buy ahem, “paraphernalia’ was the back pages of Melody Maker. There’s a reason why cosmetics advertisers in the 1990’s spent gazillions on advertising in women’s magazines.

It worked.

And now of course it’s different. Seek emails me all the jobs I might ever be interested in. The excellent Domain app has everything I need to know about Australian property at my fingertips. Carsales.com.au is much the same. As is booking.com, Wotif and of course Ebay. They’re all really good at what they do. If they weren’t someone else would be doing it better.

And they’re all free.

So no, I’m not surprised that people don’t click on display ads. That people are happy to click on “skip ad” on You Tube. Just like the National grid used to surge during the ads in Coronation Street as people got up to put the kettle on. For all the hype on the Gruen Transfer and Mad Men, ads on mass media have always been intrusive and clamouring for attention.

The difference is that with every conceivable type of media available on tap nowadays, I’d say it’s very rare that you’ve arrived at a website to consume advertising. After all, who’s got time to waste watching something they didn’t ask for? Of course the majority of display ads online don’t work. Why did we ever think they would?

About the Author. 
Alun Probert used to sell advertising on the Peterborough Evening Telegraph. As Head of GovCom in Australia 30 years on, he now specialises in communications and digital strategy for Government organisations and works with media groups and advertising agencies to help people sell more of their stuff. 
Read more at www.govcomgroup.com.au